2014-06-24 22:21:00

Bug: notification-daemon ignores timeout

On LXDE and other desktops the dbus component which listens for notifications is often notification-daemon. On most of these installations (Fedora, Red Hat and more) this listener ignores the timeout sent by clients like notify-send.

There's a discussion that notification listeners may recognize timeouts sent by clients but they should not do it because the client may set it to zero (= no timeout, display forever) or to a very big timeout (int32) causing some kind of "overload". Therefore it's up to notification-daemon to decide if it honors the given timeout.

But if you read the man page of notify-send it suggests that you actually can set this timeout. It's even worse because it belongs to a different package (libnotify). If you need the timeout because i.e. you want to display a longer text which can't be read while the default display time of 5 seconds then you need to patch your notification-daemon.

In Red Hat's bugzilla for this bug 829269 there was proper patch posted by Fabrice Bellet. Here are some RPM packages for Fedora with this patch included: